history versus fiction: historical and literary

History versus Fiction: Historical and Literary Representations of Partition

Naziya Majid Department of School Education

India While the British Empire was falling apart and consequently on the verge of decline, most colonies were asserting themselves, working towards establishing their nationhood and the genre of postcolonialism was gaining ascendancy. However, one country among these colonies was undergoing a dual process of breaking and making. It was India. The 1947 partition lingers as a contemporary phenomenon, rather than a bygone event. This is corroborated by the fact that several works regarding partition are surfacing and becoming a part of the genre of postcolonial literature. The fictional explorations challenge historiography’s rigidity and history’s claim to objectivity. Although in questioning the unquestionability of historical discourses, this counter discourse unveils the motives of imperialist discourse, besides offering an alternative interpretation of partition, yet the chapter does not achieve resolution as the depiction varies, based as it is upon the personal idiosyncrasies of the individual writers. The present study moves beyond the text-centered approach to literature and focuses on the social and political circumstances for the interpretation of literary works. As such it concentrates on some of the major partition texts and interprets them in the spirit of postcolonial counter-insurgency and politics of identity. Since the topic involves an interdisciplinary study of literature and history, therefore I have subjected three different versions of partition by Britain, India and Pakistan to critical analysis in order to contest history’s claim to objectivity. This is followed by various fictional representations of partition from both Indian and Pakistani sides to describe the relative treatment of the same historical catastrophe. The fictional works discussed in my paper include Sunlight on a Broken Column, Ice-Candy-Man, Train to Pakistan and Midnight’s Children.

Most of the former colonies were awakening to a new light of independence as the British Empire was falling into oblivion. A new term labeled as ‘postcolonial’ was seen gaining ascendancy and was being subject thereon to immense discussion, application and extension. Among the many topics scrutinized under the purview of postcolonialism, ‘the process of re-identification’ of lost identities held an important place. Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1979) gives a vivid account of how the colonizers constructed an image of the colonized people with a view to serve their hegemonic ends. The ‘binary oppositions’ created by the West were used by them to de-value the East in the first place and subsequently to legitimize their claim to dominate them. Therefore, what the champions of postcolonialism meant by the term ‘re-identification’ was a reassessment and implicitly a subversion of an identity created by others, by Europeans, thereby establishing that it is not the same thing as has been delineated from the colonizer’s perspective. What eventually followed was the rewriting of histories from the native’s perspective that not only preserves their traditions but also subverts the colonialist’s culture celebrating the marginalized.

Since the language of the colonizers was a key instrument through which the East was constructed therefore colonized subjects used it effectively to subvert the very notion of the imperial centre, “as the ‘savage’ and ‘deformed’ Caliban snarls to Prospero his master, his new language has the wonderful advantage of allowing him to express how he feels towards him” (Walder, 42). The result was an emergence and, if one can say, a mushrooming of counter-

www.the-criterion.comThe Criterion

An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165

Vol. IV. Issue III June 2013

1 Editor-In-Chief Dr. Vishwanath Bite

discourses from erstwhile colonies mainly in the form of histories and fiction. Africa, India, the Caribbean, South Pacific Islands, Australia and Canada-- in short in all the former colonies there was a profusion of counter-discourses. Bill Ashcroft et al. observe in their oft-quoted lines that the literatures of each of these nations is distinct because they emphasized their difference from the imperial centre (2).

Africa was deemed and rendered by European philosophers’ and thinkers’ as a primitive and barbaric land without any historical monuments or literature and hence without any history. Indeed, the German philosopher Hegel stated in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1837), “What we understand by Africa, is Unhistorical, Underdeveloped Spirit, still involved in the condition of mere nature and which has to be presented here as on the threshold of the World’s History” (Innes, 8). In fact, quite recently similar views have been echoed by the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1965: “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America, and darkness is not a subject for history” (Innes, 47).

This is true of other erstwhile colonies. According to Innes, such attitudes created inferiority complex in the minds of the natives and were used by the colonizers to justify their occupation of the lands (47). As such one of the important tasks in the process of re-identification before the newly independent nations was to re-assert and retrieve their rich but trampled cultures which had existed much before they became a colonized state. Rewriting their own past through histories or recreating it by means of fiction became an important pre-occupation by which the former colonies could project their nations in a fresh and true light. The role played by novelists in this connection has been very important. Consequently, writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, Jean Rhys among others raised a number of general as well as specific issues which had hitherto been overshadowed by Eurocentric historiography and discursively framed images in fiction.

In the Indian subcontinent, the decline of British Empire triggered an altogether different phenomenon that had the effect of altering the entire geography of this part of the globe. The ousting of colonizers was accompanied by the division of India into two independent nation-states-- India and Pakistan. While in the other former colonies emancipation from colonial yoke was hailed and celebrated, in India the same Independence though welcomed also resulted in unabated massacres and rioting and a major exodus of people across the border of two new-born countries. The tyranny of partition still bears its marks on the repressed psyche of many people. What were the factors that led to the partition? Was it unavoidable? Or could it have been averted and inhuman massacres prevented? Such are the issues that are still debated and contended upon. Whatever happened during that period comes to us either through histories claiming objectivity, personal accounts which cannot help being subjective or else through fictional portrayals. This brings us to a very important point of discussion between history and fiction. Recent views about historiography have problematized its validity. History’s claim to objectivity and impersonality is being interrogated now-a-days since facts per se and facts as rendered by historiography are two distinct goals separated by subjective perception of the historian. The first evidence that there can be different and often contradicting views of the same event is seen in two contrasting nomenclatures for the 1857 uprising. What the British historians termed as ‘Indian Mutiny’ was renamed by some Indian historians as ‘The First War of





Independence’ (Walder, 11). Regarding this period of history, T N Dhar quoting a historian expresses his views as:

Most of the recreations of this period… have largely been done through a very narrow angle of the ‘activities, ideals, or factional manoeuvres of leaders’, which make the recreations highly tendentious and unreliable (29-30).

Contrasting this with the merit of the novelists, he adds: In such a scenario, an investigation into the efforts of our novelists who have taken keen interest in our past can certainly prove significant and useful. The assumption here is that they may illuminate areas of social and cultural experience which have not received the attention of historians (30).

This latter assumption will also be questioned in the course of my discussion on this issue. Historical versions of partition describe only the ‘high politics’ and negotiations that took place between the British government, the Indian National Congress and Muslim League. But, again we observe that history’s claim to objectivity appears dim in the light of practical reality and the reality is that we have three different versions of partition before us. The British historian H. V. Hodson defends his account of partition in the following words:

…every historian, however impartial and careful of the truth…must have a personal point of view, without which history is anemic and my view point cannot but be British and that only an Indian or a Pakistani could write from the view-point of his own people and leaders (xii).

As such he gives due weight to a personal point of view in writing the so-called ‘non-anemic’ history and it is here that any attempt at impartiality and objectivity is quelled. Establishing the validity of my assumption that the possibility of subjectivity cannot be entirely removed from positivistic and scientific historical accounts I come to agree with Dhar’s statement that “history is used as a resource for legitimizing power structures and ideologies” (28). In defending the British position on partition, Hodson asserts that the partition was the climax of widening of the thin line of crack that always existed between Hindus and Muslims of India. He adduces that the seeds of communal dissention were present in the Indian soil long before the Europeans gained control of the land and even claims that the British authorities only facilitated to make the inevitable and fatalistic division amicable and peaceful. Further, Hodson repudiates the allegation that the British, through their policy of ‘divide and rule’ nourished these divisive tendencies which culminated in the partition of country:

It is not possible to divide and rule unless the ruled are ready to be divided. The British may have used the Hindu-Muslim rivalry for their own advantage, but they did not invent it. They did not write the annals of India’s history, nor foment the murderous riots that periodically flared between Hindus and Muslims in her villages and cities. They were realists and if they did use India’s divisions for their advantages, the divisions themselves were already there (xii).

For the Indian nationalists, partition was the heavy price to be paid for attaining complete Independence because the circumstances were such that there was no viable alternative. The Indian side led by Gandhi, Nehru, Azad and Patel among others laid the entire blame on the complicity between Muslim League and the British. Vacillating between the choice of accepting a ‘divided’ or a ‘destroyed’ India, a choice allegedly offered by the League, they opted for the former. For them, failure of one negotiation after another owing to obduracy of the League propelled the deepening of the schism. All the same the so-called Indian nationalists hailed themselves as bearers of “the brunt of the struggle for the liberation of India” (Philips and





Wainwright, 186). Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in his political autobiography India Wins Freedom avers that the British Empire, by partitioning India aimed at continuing to exert their influence over the political and economic life on this part of globe. He interprets the British abetment with League in the following words:

If united India had become free according to Cabinet Mission Plan, there was little chance that British could retain her position in the economic and industrial life of India. The partition of India…would, on the other hand give Britain a strange hold on Indian life (209).

K.K Aziz in his book, The Partition of India and the Emergence of Pakistan (1990) vindicates the birth of a separate state for Muslims. Aziz deconstructs the generally held idea of India as a nation with homogeneity which always knew ‘unity in diversity’. Like M.A.H Ispahani, who calls it an ‘illusory unity’, Aziz traces the differences in every aspect of life between Hindus and Muslims even before the rise and fall of the Mughal Empire. Two different societies, according to Aziz, the Hindus and Muslims had “little in common” ranging from simple divisions through literature, architecture and general way of living to the more complex divergences in outlook in which the two communities looked back upon their common history. He writes:

…they were not willing to take the same view of history. Muslim achievements were generally belittled by the Hindus. The Muslim success in conquering such vast territories and holding them against heavy odds was looked upon as a crime because the period of Muslim rule had openly been called “an age of slavery” (13).

Aziz then goes on to ask a very pertinent question: How could two peoples with such divergence in their outlook, beliefs, mores, tastes and inclinations be moulded into one without making one, or the other, or both to sacrifice something that had entered into the innermost recesses of their very souls? (13)

Therefore, it seems as if the fissures of division were present in the collective unconscious or racial memory of both the communities. The Muslims as a separate nation had always existed but it was only the decline of British Empire coupled with Congress aka Hindu communalism that precipitated the distant dream of Pakistan into a future prospect. M.A.H Ispahani accords with Aziz though he concentrates mainly on the period when the British Empire’s decline was almost complete and partition was in the offing. He mainly highlights the dubious and communal attitude of Congress, which, under the aegis of Gandhi, Nehru and Tilak aimed at establishing ‘ram raj’ in India after gaining the control from British. As a consequence of this, he adds, “Muslim feeling…crossed the line and a clear-cut partition remained the only alternative” (Philips and Wainwright, 344). Commenting on the British role in the facilitation of partition and acceptance of separate Muslim state, he says:

Mountbatten advocated partition not out of any sense of fair-play for the legitimacy of the Muslim claim to a share in freedom but because of his eagerness to help the Congress build up a mighty Hindu state which would through its strength, one day absorb the remaining areas (354).

This is in so far the narrative historiography of partition goes and as we observe here, it reveals itself to be fallacious. Though all the sides, before giving an account of the entire process, pledge impersonality and neutrality and claim to ground their narration on authentic sources, we feel convinced that the rendering of facts is not entirely free from the respective





subjectivities of both sides. How can two diametrically opposed accounts citing valid sources lay claim on objectivity? Indeed, it can be well understood that although the sources which are quoted may be valid, there is a modification and interpretation of facts which is colored by personal prejudices of the historiographer. This inherent flaw has led to constant debates on the unstable nature of history so that “Even professional historians and philosophers of history no longer vouch for history and history-writing with the kind of assurance with which they did until not too long ago” (Dhar, 9). The most important theorist of history, Hayden White, in his works like Tropics of Discourse (1973); Meta-history (1973); and The Content of Form (1987) postulates that history is a verbal prose structure in the form of a narrative discourse, the content of which is as much imagined and invented as formed. This skepticism regarding the reliability of history has necessarily transcended our monolithic acculturation into the realm of plurality and multiciplity. Besides, narrative fiction is seen to offer another viable alternative to the representation of history. “From among the various literary forms, the novel’s connection with history has been the closest and had most far-reaching cultural consequences” (Dhar, 9) so that “the boundary between history and fiction is no longer water-tight or fixed” (Dhar, 11). However the difference which is very illuminating is that, “…novelist does not need ‘the retelling of great historical events’ but concentrate on ‘the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events” (Dhar, 12). Nevertheless, the postmodernist tendency leads us to dwell more on erasing the boundaries between narrative history and narrative fiction by viewing both as ‘discourses’ rather than pointing out differences. It is in this context that Linda Hutcheon says, “…recent critical readings have focused more on what the two modes of writing [history and fiction] share than on how they differ” (Crane, 3). When both history and fiction are labeled as ‘discourses’ they can be or rather have been radically questioned and their claims to represent reality truthfully have been interrogated. How histories too can be flawed has already been established. Henceforth works of fiction involving partition as a motif would be scrutinized in the light of the twentieth century concept of ‘Impersonality of the artist’. The literary corpus has responded to the violence of partition in many ways. However, narrative fiction about the holocaust of partition does not overtly concern itself with the high politics that went into the formation of two separate states-- India and Pakistan. It generally concerns itself with the fate of those ordinary Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs caught in the realm of larger politics. It is ironical that the swift splurge of slaughter that swept the sub-continent in the name of religion, in reality distanced its perpetrators from that very religion. The undaunted communal frenzy with which murders, mauling, loot, arson, and rapes were committed did not reveal any religious sanctity which was associated with the creation of the utopian Hindu and Muslim states. The unabated massacres and violent uprooting created a massive psycho-existential complex in the sub-conscious of the victims. And this repressed trauma found an apt catharsis in partition fiction which evolved as a promising genre in the Indo-English fiction. A large number of novelists have employed the theme of partition as a sequel to independence in their novels. There have been a good number of works from the Indian side, foremost among them being Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), Manohar Malgonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges (1964), Chaman Nahal’s Azadi (1975), and Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961). Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize winning novel Midnight’s Children (1980) touches briefly upon partition though in a very important perspective. On the Pakistani side very few novels in English are concerned with the events of partition. These include Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-





Candy-Man (1988), Mehr Nigar’s Shadows of Time (1987), and Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided (1957). Every great event in the history of human existence has brought in its wake a profuse amount of literary representation whether in the form of poetry or fiction. Such an over-whelming and tragic event as partition which entailed mass massacres and largest exodus of population known in history has not produced the amount of literature that it should have is a concern raised by novelists like Bhabani Bhattacharya and Bapsi Sidhwa. Bhabani Bhattacharya writes: “The tragedies of partition have been beyond anything that a writer could ‘invent’. But where is the creative expression of all these happenings?” (Dhawan,1982, 31). One more point which is relevant to the study conducted here is that, although much of the blame in all the works of partition fiction is laid on capricious leaders and power-hungry politicians, yet there are subtle nuances of inclination towards one particular side reflective of an inherent subjectivity in dealing with the issue. That is to say among the fictional representations, very few writers have been able to extricate themselves from personal prejudices as will be made clear in the brief study of four novels-- Sunlight on a Broken Column, Train to Pakistan, Ice-Candy-Man and Midnight’s Children. Each of these novels encompasses a different perspective of partition.

Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) portrays the growth of the narrator-protagonist Laila amidst social and political upheavals. Novy Kapadia holds the view that in addition to the search for identity and order (which the novel sets out to explore), the novel functions at two levels-- personal and political (Dhawan, 1995, 167). However a keen analysis confirms the functioning of the plot at three inter-connected levels-- personal, social and political-- corresponding respectively to Laila’s quest for identity, the disintegration of feudal society and the throes of partition.

Many critics of the novel have endorsed the view that Attia Hosain has presented a Muslim perspective of partition. But this generalization needs qualification. Firstly, the novel no doubt projects a Muslim perception but this perception is not entirely coherent and homogenous. Through various characters, Attia Hosain presents different opinions in favor of and against the impending vivisection of the country. R K Mathur also confirms this fact, “…the Muslims she portrays have no unanimity of views” (Dhawan, 1995, 201). Saleem while defending his connections with Muslim League makes some pertinent remarks:

I believe the Congress has a strong anti-Muslim element in it against which Muslims must organize. The danger is great because it is hidden, like an ice-berg. When it was just a question of fighting the British, the Progressive forces were uppermost, but now the submerged reactionary elements will surface. Muslims must unite against them (Hosain, 233).

He continues: The majority of Hindus have not forgotten or forgiven Muslims for having ruled over them for hundreds of years. Now they can democratically take revenge. The British have ruled about two hundred years, and see how much they are hated (Hosain, 234).

To which Aunt Saira adds: Oh dear, there is no question, it would be better to have the British stay on than Hindus ruling (Hosain, 234).

The views expressed by Saleem, Aunt Saira and others were the views held by majority of Muslims who opted for Pakistan. It shows that Muslim fears were not airy nothings. They had well-reasoned arguments in support of their demand for Pakistan. Other characters like Uncle





Hamid and Kemal have their own reservations about the idea of a separate state. For Kemal: “This is my country. I belong to it. I love it. One does not bargain…But I believe in my country. I have to fight for what I believe in” (Hosain, 287). As a result of their individual choices, a virtual partition occurs in Laila’s own household.

Secondly, the views of different characters are circumscribed since the novel focuses on the effects of partition on the elite class i.e. Muslim taluqdars. Therefore, it can in no way be acknowledged as the voice echoing all Muslims. Since the novel is autobiographical in tone, the opinions of the novelist find voice in Laila who for the most part is alienated and confused because for her freedom from the patriarchal society and quest for identity are more demanding concerns. Her usual expressions like, “I felt curiously detached…”, “What was one to believe in.”, “Dutiful to whom? To what? To what I believe is true? Or those I am asked to obey?” show that her preoccupations with her own identity hinder her from taking any sides. She says to Asad, “Such hatreds are being stirred up. How can we live together as a nation if all the time only the differences between communities are being preached? I cannot understand…” (Hosain, 245). It is only in the fourth part of the novel, when Laila reminiscences on the events of partition that we get a hint of her sympathies for ‘undivided’ India.

Laila’s elusiveness can be understood by comparing her with Hosain’s own views regarding the nationalist movement and partition. Though inclined towards Congress, Attia Hosain herself chose to move to England after partition instead of facing a choice between the two countries. She has no doubt presented the fears of Muslims as well as the views of Indian Nationalists, her protagonist, nevertheless chooses the latter. Therefore Laila’s inclination in favor of undivided India and against the ‘reactionary’ League is in fact reflective of Attia Hosain’s personal sympathies with the Congress. As such the perception of partition and other events presented in the novel are not entirely impersonal and neutral, which artistic objectivity enjoins. The events around and after the partition are only being employed by the novelist in tracing the identity crisis of the protagonist. The crisis gets accentuated with the social and political upheavals of the time.

Bapsi Sidhwa’s name features second in the list of women writers of the post-independent, fragmented Indian sub-continent (the first being Attia Hosain). Out of her four published novels, Ice-Candy-Man (1988) deals directly with the colossal upheaval of partition as it tears asunder the naïve and innocent world of the child-narrator, Lenny. Ice-Candy-Man represents, as Sidhwa confirms a “revisionist history of partition from a Pakistani perspective” (Crane “Bapsi Sidhwa Biography”). By writing such a novel she is setting the record straight and balanced. Before this novel, only two versions of partition existed in history and more importantly in fiction-- one Indian and the other British. Both these accounts were lop-sided indulging in excessive aggrandizement of their own accomplishments while relegating those of other’s as perfidious. It is against this connived bias that Bapsi Sidhwa is vindicating:

…an injustice done to a country (Misrepresentation of Pakistani view of Partition in Ice-Candy Man) or injustice done to a political leader (the presentation of Mohammad Ali Jinnah in the struggle for independence which she tries to rectify in Ice-candy Man) (Dhawan and Kapadia, 14).

Sidhwa’s artistic merit lies in the fact that nowhere is she seen justifying the birth of Pakistan. What she is endeavoring to challenge is that the upholding and glamorizing of only one side is not a correct thing to do. Muslim League and Jinnah were no fanatics and Gandhi and Nehru were no saints either. They were simply politicians maneuvering situations to suit their ends. As Robert Ross says, “While the novel is too subtle to state a direct political view, it does





not idolize the Indian leaders and vilify Jinnah, as so often happens in post-partition fiction and histories” (Dhawan and Kapadia, 76). In her own words: “In Ice-Candy-Man, I stressed a central concern-- the evil done in the name of religion by politicians, and located the ordinariness of the people who so mercilessly preyed on the victims of Partition” (Dhawan and Kapadia, 31-32). This is rendered well enough by Lenny in the text: “One man’s religion is another man’s poison” (Sidhwa, 117). According to Robert.L Ross, Ralph.J Crane, Subhash Chandra and Novy Kapadia what facilitates the novelist in presenting an objective view of the atrocities perpetrated during partition is firstly her Parsi sensitivity through which the child-narrator re-tells the phantasmagoric events. Being members of a community which maintained neutrality during partition, both Sidhwa and her narrator do not sympathize with or justify the mayhem let loose by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs on each other. Secondly, by employing a child narrator Bapsi Sidhwa paints an undaunting, naïve, detached and unbiased picture of the bloody hostility. Commenting on Lenny’s narratorial quality Novy Kapadia writes: “With the wonder of a child she is observing social change and human behaviour, noting interesting side-lights, seeking and listening opinions and occasionally making judgments” (Dhawan and Kapadia, 35).

This apparently objective narration however comes to be questioned when we recall Sidhwa’s own words that she wanted to vindicate Jinnah and Pakistan. Therefore the novelist herself is indulging in the same blame-game of which she accuses other writers i.e. vilifying and even implicitly satirizing one at the cost of other. In the novel, we find a number of comments from various characters including Lenny herself where Indian nationalists are mocked at. Many statements made by the butcher, masseur and ice-candy man aim at deconstructing the aura surrounding Gandhi’s deified image, revealing him to be a politician just like anyone else. Therefore it can be inferred that though Sidhwa might have succeeded in maintaining religious neutrality in rendering the brutality committed by the three communities, she is not able to do so as far as her nationalistic concerns are involved. Her religious neutrality is over-shadowed by her nationalistic subjectivity.

Train to Pakistan (1956) holds a pioneering position in Indian English fiction on the theme of partition. Critics attribute the literary merit of this novel to the dispassionate, objective distancing of the novelist in the depiction of the gory events. Khushwant Singh sympathizes with neither side and categorically says: “The fact is, both sides killed. Both shot and stabbed and speared and clubbed. Both tortured. Both raped” (Singh, 9). The novelist re-asserts his objective view in an interview where he qualifies Train to Pakistan as “…the first novel on the partition theme and totally unbiased” (Rao et al., 41). Singh also manages to keep his narrative detached from political drama enacted behind the saga of partition, choosing instead to delineate the effects of this horrendous crisis on the common masses. One interesting observation about Train to Pakistan is that this novel does not interest itself with any specific person or group. Rather, it revolves entirely around the village of Mano Majra. A remote and obscure village on the border, life in this tiny hamlet ambles at its own pace even when the entire nation is caught up in communal flames. The sub-Inspector of police reports their ignorance to the Deputy Commissioner: “I am sure no one in Mano Majra even knows that the British have left and the country is divided in Pakistan and Hindustan” (Singh, 33). He is even shown to be wondering at the calm and peace that is still prevailing in Mano Majra: “Here we are on the border with Muslims living in Sikh villages as if nothing had happened” and therefore concludes that “…I am sure they are getting money from them” (Singh, 30).





The serene tranquility of this placid village receives its first jolt when trains loaded with corpses pour in from across the border dividing Mano Majra “…into two halves as neatly as a knife cuts through a pat of butter” (Singh, 141). Khushwant Singh presents Mano Majra as a microcosm of India to reveal how slowly and steadily violence crept into every nook and corner of the country. He also makes an implicit critique of the helplessness shown by the refined and cultured strata of the society in bringing down the scale of violence. Through the characters of Hukum Chand, Meet Singh and Iqbal, Singh satirizes the bureaucracy, religious institutions and the intelligentsia for their utter failure in checking the display of barbarism during partition riots. On the other hand, he exalts the stature of common and rustic people like Jugga who turn out to be victims and saviors during the partition crisis (Rao et al., 40).The novelist does not describe the places or events as such; rather he chooses to paint them with the objectivity of a detached artist. However, in the lines where Hukum Chand muses over the catastrophic events, we find the novelist’s voice reverberating in the thought process of the Deputy Commissioner.

Salman Rushdie’s magnum opus, Midnight’s Children (1981) stands distinct from the novels discussed so far in that it does not handle partition as a predominant theme. One of the main concerns of this novel is with history-- and its synchrony with the life of an individual-- as the protagonist-narrator Saleem Sinai affirms at the very outset that “…I had been mysteriously hand-cuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country” (Rushdie, 9). While the rest of the novels discussed here take up partition as a major historical event shaping and altering the life of a particular group of people, Midnight’s Children touches upon more vast frontiers in as much as partition becomes one of the many landmark events in the history of India that have a direct bearing on the narrator and his family. The narrator-protagonist very subtly conjures up a threatening shadow of riots and bloodshed in the midst of Independence celebrations in the following words:

And in all the cities all the towns all the villages the little dia-lamps burn on window-sills porches verandahs, while trains burn in Punjab with the green flames of blistering paint and the glaring saffron of fired fuel, like the biggest dias in the world. And the city of Lahore, too, is burning (Rushdie, 115-16).

He also gives occasional glimpse of communal hatred propagated in words like: “NO PARTITION OR ELSE PERDITION! MUSLIMS ARE THE JEWS OF ASIA! [sic]” (Rushdie, 72) painted on walls and in remarks like: “The police, in 1947, were not to be relied upon by Muslims” (Rushdie, 72). Midnight’s Children turns out to be a very dense novel because it simultaneously falls into many genres. It is at once a postcolonial, postmodern and a historical novel and simultaneously it belongs to the narrative genres of magic realism, historiographic meta-fiction as well as Indian oral narrative traditions. The plot involves both history and fiction and Rushdie achieves a master-stroke by exposing the fact that there is very little difference between the two. The protagonist synchronizes his birth and events with the birth and progress of Independent India. His seemingly unwary errors and confusions reveal his deliberate attempts to confer upon himself a central position around which all important historical events revolve so that he often feels dubious that “…in my desperate need for meaning…I’m prepared to distort every-thing – to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in the central role?” (Rushdie, 166). This might at times seem absurd and forced but the point that Rushdie wants to bring home is that any claim at objective historiography is an illusion.

In the light of this discussion, it is clear that even in the fictional representation of a distressing event like partition and its ensuing slaughters, one is not able to maintain a cool, calm





and detached perspective and consequently personal sentiments and biases get leaked and interposed in one way or other. This holds true of Khushwant Singh also, notwithstanding his claims about objectivity. Nonetheless, in comparison with other writers on the same theme, he definitely seems less subjective.

While writers like Attia Hosain, Bapsi Sidhwa and Khushwant Singh in their representative novels are seen to counter the historical accounts of partition only, Salman Rushdie is challenging the entire concept of historiography in his novel Midnight’s Children, with partition as one of the landmark in the colossal history of India. And he definitely succeeds in maintaining that impartiality cannot be avowed for either in fiction or, more importantly, in history. By deeply engrossing his protagonist, Saleem Sinai in subjective speculations, Rushdie, the novelist negates any claim to objectivity.

Works Cited:

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. London: Routledge, 1989. Print.

Azad, M A K. India Wins Freedom. London: Orient Longman, 1988. Print.

Aziz, K K. The Partition of India and the Emergence of Pakistan. New Delhi: Kanti Publications, 1990. Print.

Crane, Ralph J. Inventing India-- A History of India in English Language Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1992. Print.

Dhar, T N. History-Fiction Interface in Indian English Novel. New Delhi: Prestige, 1999. Print.

Dhawan, R K, ed. Explorations in Modern Indo-English Fiction. Chandigarh: Bahri Publications, 1982. Print.

Dhawan, R K, ed. Indian Women Novelists. Set III. Vol. 2 New Delhi: Prestige, 1995. Print.

Dhawan R K and Novy Kapadia, eds. The Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1996. Print.

Hodson, H V. “Preface”. The Great Divide. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1969. Print.

Hosain, Attia. Sunlight on a Broken Column. London: Penguin, 1988. Print.

Innes, C L. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English. New York: CUP, 2007. Print.

Ispahani, M.A.H. “Factors Leading to the Partition of British India.” The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives. 1935-47. Eds. C H Philip & Mary Doreen Wainwright. London: George Allen & Unwind Ltd., 1970. Print.





Nanda, B R. “Nehru, The Indian National Congress and the Partition of India.” The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives. 1935-47. Eds. C H Philip & Mary Doreen Wainwright. London: George Allen & Unwind Ltd., 1970. Print.

Rao, V Pala Prasad, K Nirupa Rani and D Bhaskara Rao. India-Pakistan-- Partition Perspectives in Indo-English Novels. New Delhi: Delhi Publishing House, 2004. Print.

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage, 1995. Print.

Sidhwa, Bapsi. Ice-Candy- Man. London: Penguin, 1988. Print.

Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988. Print.

Walder, Dennis. Post-Colonial Literatures in English. New Delhi: Atlantic, 1998. Print.





history versus fiction: historical and literary

Documents